"The Idol" has been cancelled

There are TV series-events that pass like fever dreams: they are short-lived, strange, everyone talks about them and everyone forgets about them soon after. Like the remake of Gossip Girl, the very expensive The Rings of Power or even the second season of Euphoria. But nothing had prepared us (or prepared HBO's top management) for the spectacular disaster of The Idol. If the first episode had entertained and divided us with its trashiness, and if Hollywood's most hated enfant prodige, Sam Levinson, had promised us the show of the summer, the rest of the series was a masterpiece of bad scripting culminating in a completely illogical ending after the network itself had removed an entire episode of the show mid-schedule - a virtually unheard-of decision that testifies to how high distrust was for the show. If, however, Lily-Rose Depp emerged from the disaster with her reputation safe, thanks to her acting chops and the two songs World Class Sinner and Dollhouse, everything else about the series was slaughtered by critics and audiences alike. Today, however, came the final axe-blow: HBO officially canceled the series.

Why was The Idol controversial?

Controversy had begun as early as production, with a Rolling Stone exposé on the nature of the series, a Twitter reaction by The Weeknd who insulted the newspaper, the exit of director Amy Seimetz from the show due to her "female perspective" (news that immediately gave the measure of Levinson and Tesfaye's intentions for the show), and the sudden entry of Sam Levinson who had set about rehashing existing material to shoot new material. In the first episodes of the show, greeted by unenthusiastic criticism, then, the gap in quality between the scenes shot by Seimetz and those by Levinson had clearly emerged while The Weeknd's performance had attracted numerous online sneers. The fact, then, that the home audience had manifestly hated the numerous sex scenes as well as the psychological atmosphere of the series, admittedly a bit murky but certainly not as angsty and sick as many thought, had already decreed its failure. One does not live on hate-watching alone after all.

In truth, it had already been specified earlier in the summer that The Idol was to be a mini-series with no sequel. Nevertheless, after the hype created by Levinson, who had called it a «the biggest show of the summer» presentation in Cannes, after a storm of controversy that the stellar cast (Jennie from Blackpink, Rachel Sennott, Troye Sivan and The Weeknd himself as well as Mike Dean himself) had tried to put to rest, fewer and fewer people have seen it, certainly put off by the caustic Twitter humor, bad reviews and HBO's decision to cancel an entire episode to salvage what could be saved. In fact, the confusion was also caused by the different information in the cast's possession since Moses Sumney, another breakout star on the show, had specified that it was a limited series when the contract was signed while Da'Vine Joy Randolph had recently said she believed there would be a second season. The Idol, in short, ended as it began: in utter chaos.